Cannes, France, May 21: Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese were set for a victory lap at Cannes on Sunday after their Native American crime epic, “Killers of the Flower Moon” scored rave reviews, while the festival prepared to bow down before Jude Law as King Henry VIII.
Scorsese’s latest opus, about a wave of murders among oil-rich Osage Indians in the 1920s, was showered in words like “searing”, “triumph” and “masterpiece” by critics who scored the Cannes Film Festival’s hottest ticket on Saturday night.
Based on a non-fiction bestseller, the film sees DiCaprio as a weak-willed man who marries a wealthy Osage woman and is drawn into the deadly schemes of his kingpin uncle, played by Scorsese’s other long-time muse, Robert De Niro.
IndieWire said DiCaprio gives “his best-ever performance”, while The Guardian awarded five stars for a “remarkable epic about the bloody birth of America”.
The stars were due to address reporters later on Sunday.
But the festival was already set for another glitzy premiere later in the day, with “Firebrand” starring Jude Law as 16th-century English king Henry VIII alongside Alicia Vikander as his sixth and final wife, Catherine Parr.